tion of lost souls lives in hope of safe harbor. They try to manufacture con- tentment in their songs and stories. The ferry never shows up, the island is never reached. On the surface, anyway, their trip is, as one of them observes, a "use- less, endless, unhappy outing." But as the group bears witness to mystery its collective sense of life is deepened. Berna tells a fantastical story about a flying house and defends It by recollect- ing a law professor dubbed Offense to Reason, who thought reason was the key to truth. "A flying house. . . marches up to reason and belts it across the gob and says to it, 'Fuck you reason. I'm as good as you any day. You haven't all the fucking answers-not by any means,'" she says. "That's why I like it. . . . It's stupid, futile defiance." '4- tigial ritual gestures, like the taking off of shoes and socks, doing the "rounds" by walking around the turas at least three times, and bottling water from the "holy well," which in this case is a puddle of rainwater. In the man- ner of pilgrims, the group hangs scarves, pieces of cloth, a bouquet of wild- flowers on the life-belt stand. Each touches it before leaving the hallowed ground and travelling back to the un- holy world Friel sounds one final note of defiance. Angela, the agnostic, vows to return to the place every year: "Not out of need-out of desire! Not in ex- pectation-but to attest, to affirm, to acknowledge-to shout Yes, Yes, Yes! Damn right we will, Terry! Y es-yes- yes!" She puts her sun hat at the top of the life-belt stand, giving the cross an ; .........,.",., 't? -- 'Ç-..",.._Þ Brian Friel charts a landscape of faith in "Wondeiful Tennessee. " 'Wonderful Tennessee" is a similar act of defiance: a defense-some have saId a misguided one-not so much of illusion as of the miraculous Oileán Draíochta reawakens the characters' ancestral sense of the sacred-the long- ing to go beyond the vanity of despair and to acknowledge even in pain the wonder of life. The experience makes them believers "Even if we don't get there," Trish says of the Island of Mys- tery, "well at least we know... it's there." Friel shows them unconscious- ly recapitulating the island's rituals. A game of stones that Trish plays in the second act gradually turns into a piling up of stones-"doing the túras," which, 5 the program explains, was part of the ritual of pilgrimage to lnishkeel Is- => land-and is accompanied by other ves- intimation of human form. She exits with George, who is playing his accor- dion, and the two of them jauntily refuse death its dominion as they"loud- ly, joyously, happily" sing the play's title song. Friel's allegory is unavoidably sche- matic. Despite the power of his poetry and his shrewd construction, the play's meaning seems more imposed by the author than earned by the characters, who are given problems but only a pa- tina of personality. Friel's appeal to the heart is made largely through the head. (Even the respectful second-night Dublin audience gave the play only two curtain calls.) The director, Patrick Mason, makes an elegant asset of this limitation by mounting the play in a style as defiantly formalized as Friel's 83 parable. His friezelike staging denies the expectation of depth and the com- fort of naturalism. He places his actors on diagonals, which emphasize their silhouettes and exaggerate every turn of the head and body. "From my point of view, the intention is that the life of the interstices-the spaces between the characters, the connection of looks-is what's important," he told me. "Everyone has to be precisely placed. Every look, every gesture, every tableau has to be filled with narrative." Mason, who has had a long-standing superb collaboration with Friel, quoted the playwright: 'We have a dialogue here on this island between ourselves. If we are overheard and understood then that's icing on the cake." Mason add- ed, "Wonderful Tennessee' is part of that dialogue. When the characters lift those stones, when they touch those cloths, there are generations stirring in the air of this theatre. I know it. I feel it every night. People know it in their b " ones. Mason's production of "Dancing at Lughnasa" has gone around the world; and 'Wonderful Tennessee" is sched- wed to open on Broadway, at the Ply- mouth Theatre, in October. Its arrival on the island of Manhattan is as prob- lematic as the arrival of Friel's pilgrims on the Island of Mystery. Broadway, which sanctifies profit, not prophecy, has lost a sense of what or how to cel- ebrate. Whether the living heart of faIth can be grafted on the dead body of American show business is anybody's guess. "I'm not giving up, " Terry says, ever hopeful of success in the journey. " T . E " I ' d wo-one agaInst. ven money. say the odds for "Wonderful Ten- nessee" , s surviving more than a heart- beat on Broadway are longer than that. But I hope it reaches its destination, and wins the hard and important battle to be heard. . Dahlias love the Bay Area climate, grow- ing well as long as there is at least half a day of sun. However, they thrive best in well- drained loamy soil and fed with 0-20-20 fertilizer. To plant, dig a hole six inches deep, pound in a steak, place the tuber eye up, and cover with three inches of sOI1.-San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News. Real food for real dahlias.